Pale Queen
by Empatheia
Summary: -Alice- Burtonverse. A tourist in the dreaming world, never quite asleep. She was born with one foot in one world and the other in another, and chose first one and then the other.


**A/N**: This marks the end of a long, terrible dry spell in which I could not write more than five words in a row without loathing them and instantly hitting backspace. I can't speak to the quality of this piece, but at least it's made it to the publishing stage, which is (at the very least) progress.

One quick note: this story is set in some sort of imaginary early eighteen-hundreds in which the East India Company was founded by Alice's father and there were no pesky wars to muddle things up.

The beautiful lyrics at the beginning are from Florence + the Machine's _Blinding_, which I listened to on repeat while writing this.

**x.x.x**

_**Pale Queen**_

**x.x.x**

_no more dreaming of the dead as if death itself were undone_

_no more calling like a crow for a boy, for a body in the garden_

_no more dreaming like a girl so in love_

_so in love with the wrong world_

In a tavern in the dark of Singapore, two men downed deep cups of warm rice wine and talked of many things (let it never be said that men do not gossip), of news, and of what strange things rumours had told them in the shadows of the day. Their hair was bright as tow, filthy as it was, and marked them as aliens, as did the strange, awkward tongue they spoke. Britain had forgotten them, but Singapore's welcome was half-hearted, so they worked and slept and kept their heads down, and sometimes came to drink their fears and sorrows away in a tavern in the dark of the city.

"Did you hear? Did you hear?"

"I did not, do tell!"

"The good King has gone half-blind from the drink, they say."

"If I had a cellar full of vintage so fine as his, I'd blind myself in half the time!"

It was the age of travel, the world both expanding and narrowing as the number of places yet unexplored shrank, and tall ships ruled the seas. They had come on such ships at the top of their lives, highminded and adventurous, assured of honours and accolades and handfuls of gold. These shining dreams had long since vanished across the low grey seas.

It was the age of gold and tea and opium and pirates, and they had no higher destiny within it. All they had was wine and a warm tavern and rumours of greatness.

"Say, did you hear? A ship from England docked this afternoon and there was a woman on board."

"A woman? You rascal, I think you've had too many, I do. You oughta go home and sleep it off before you tell me there was a unicorn, too, and piles of rubies under the sea."

"No unicorns, no rubies, shut your silly mouth. Just a woman. They say she owns half the Company and can sail like a seabird, and has hair golden as the sunrise."

"Oh, really, and what else do they say? Does she have wings to fly and trail silver wherever she walks?"

"No! Hush! Really, you can be so ridiculous. She's just a woman, mortal-born, and she wears shoes like the rest of us. They say she's uncommon pretty, though, a toothsome thing to be sure. But don't tangle with her -- she carries a sword, and its edge is sharp as any."

"And what is this heavenly creature called, pray tell? A name, if she's so ordinary?"

"She's not ordinary, but she's got a name. Can't quite recall it at the moment, started with an a, I think... ah! I remember: Alice. Alice Kingsleigh."

x.x.x

It was a hard life. The stays tore and blistered her hands, the salt dried and ruined her skin, her muscles grew lean and unwomanly with the long days of labour. The Alice who arrived in Singapore was hardly like at all to the soft, pale, bluebooded girl who had left the shores of England at the bow of the Company ship. Her face and arms were dark as any sailor's from the sun, and her intelligent eyes burned with grey fire from under her sunbleached brows.

Even so, there was a wise and contented light to her, apparent to all who saw her, and hers was the straight and proud back of one who regretted nothing.

There was also -- and this was why she was the stuff of rumours and not merely an oddity -- an air of mystery to her, of strangeness and magic. If sometimes, when she drew the sword at her side, a phantom line of white opals flickered along its length, and if sometimes when she slept the sea turned silver all about her ship, and if sometimes she looked into the shadows and smiled at things no one else could see, it only contributed to the legend building itself around her.

Some people (most people, really) were born to be unremarkable, to work the docks and man the oars and cull the bad tea leaves from the good, to do all the small and ordinary things required to keep the world trundling ponderously along its tracks. They were like to the earth itself, millions of grains of sand and earth, the base of human life and indispensible.

Some were born to be a little remarkable, to lead their small peoples and save lives and take them, to be remembered as a little more special and charismatic than most. They were grass and moss, holding the earth together, indistinguishable from each other except on close scrutiny, very important but also very boring.

Then there were people born to be very remarkable indeed, to turn the heads of every person who saw them and leave lasting marks on the track of time, to guide and lead and rule, to make the big decisions which changed the face of the world; people like trees, massive pillars reaching for the sky, visible from very far away, with entire lands flourishing under their spreading branches.

And then, at the last, were people who were hardly recognizable as merely people at all, born to make all those who met them remember that the world is much vaster and stranger than they know, strange flowers, beautiful and fragrant and luminous in the moonlight. The purpose of such people was not readily apparent, but they were beautiful, and humanity had ever yearned for beauty. Of such sort was the woman named Alice Kingsleigh, a pale and sharp-thorned rose.

No one who ever met Alice ever forgot her afterwards. For her part, Alice rarely forgot things either, but that was only because she was very clever and saw patterns and colours where everyone else saw only the milling grey chaos of daily human life. The name of the stevedore who helped her down was hardly important, but the style of his dress and the manner of his speech delighted her, because they were new and unfamiliar to her, as was the rich and spicy smell of Singapore's heavy summer air.

Alice Kingsleigh was twenty-one years old, but her eyes were ageless, and the passing years did not touch them.

x.x.x

"Say, have you heard? Did you know?"

"What now, do tell?"

"They say Her Ladyship's returned again, aboard the biggest ship you've ever saw, all full of silver from Nippon and a hundred wonderful things."

"What sort of things?"

"Beautiful things. Presents for the King, mayhap."

"As if he needs more, the old glutton."

"Even so, he is a King, and a King always has need of beautiful things."

x.x.x

Someone had told Alice once that she could see Queen Elizabeth in a dream but it wouldn't mean it was really her, but just because it was a dream it didn't mean it wasn't. It sounded like something her father would have said, but her father had only ever made light of dreams, so it couldn't have been him. Aunt Imogene was mad enough to have said it, but not wise enough, because the two did not always go together despite what stories would have one believe. Lord Ascot was wise enough, but had no magic in him at all and thus never dreamed of anything but his own mundane life.

It hardly mattered in any case; the point was that she saw Wonderland many times in her dreams over the years, but seeing it did not make it real. When at last she found her way there again, it was also in a dream, and the fact that it was a dream did not discount its realness a bit.

She was thirty-five now, and there were wrinkles about her eyes and a limp in her step, but in the dream she was nineteen again and flawless.

And in the dream, the Queen of Hearts' head was even larger than she had remembered, but she knew it was real because the Queen of Hearts was crying. They were not the enormous, overdramatic tears of resentment and petulant misery that would have suited her face as Alice remembered it. Instead, they were small and silver, and made her eyes sag like she was very old even though she was not. Her hair was loose and bedraggled about her face, and her regal red dress was reduced to a collection of rags.

Even so, she had a loveliness now that she had not before, a sorrowful depth of spirit and humble grace she had utterly lacked when Alice had last seen her.

About her wrist was an iron chain, and on the other end of the chain was a dead man. The Queen of Hearts stroked his dark hair with a slow and shaking hand, over and over again, and cried.

"He hated me, but he was all I had," she said. "It is better to have even one enemy than no one at all."

Because she was so very sad, and so alone, Alice pitied her, and sat in the dirt beside her for a while. "How long has it been?" she asked.

"How long have I been here, or how long have I been alone?" the Queen asked waspishly, her old fire returning a little, given something to burn.

Alice shrugged. "Either. Both. How long?"

The Queen sighed and raised her wrinkled hands to count on. Her nails were long and jagged, and there was dirt under them, and something that looked a little like dried blood. Perhaps she had been killing rats for her supper. "Two forevers since my sister cast me out. One since he died."

"How many years?" Alice pressed.

"Years?" the Queen echoed. "I don't know. There are no seasons here. There's no point in counting them anyway, since I will live forever."

That seemed to Alice very sad indeed, but she could feel herself waking up and had no strength in her dream-fingers. "Perhaps I can speak to your sister," she offered, because she was as kind as she was strong and the Queen's plight had moved her heart. She had never met anyone so evil they deserved to suffer forever. She had met many who deserved to suffer for a very long time, but it had already been a long time, and the Queen had already lost everything she wanted to keep.

The dream faded, but before she could vanish entirely, the Queen caught her wrist and said, "Don't forget me. Even if you hate me, it's so very much worse to be forgotten than hated. Please don't forget me."

"I won't," Alice promised, and woke up.

She was thirty-five again, and felt that much older for having been nineteen again for a little while. Though it was dark in her cabin, she could feel the sun rising through the rocking waves beneath her ship. She knew what colour the water would be, to the exact shade of cold green, were she to dive overboard and swim with the silver fishes. If it were not winter, perhaps she would have.

England lay many long leagues ahead, but today the wind was with them.

x.x.x

"Say, did you hear?"

"More stories about your pale queen? Does your wife know how you ramble on and on about another woman behind her back? She's a good, hardworking woman, you shouldn't do this to her."

"Hush, what she don't know won't hurt her. Her Ladyship vanished at sea, they say, on her way home to England. They say she talked about seeing something underwater and jumped right off the ship. From what I hear, they watched her swim deeper and deeper until all they could see was her hair, shining in the dark, until she disappeared altogether. They thought she was gone forever and drafted up her obituary and everything. Then they pulled her out of the ocean three days and ninety leagues later, right as rain, and she thought she'd only been gone a few minutes."

"Now you're just pulling my leg. Those waters are cold as a witch's tit, she would've been dead within the hour. They must be funning everyone."

"I say they ain't."

"I say they are."

"Then I suppose you and I will have to agree to disagree, won't we?"

"I suppose we will."

x.x.x

At the bottom of the sea, Alice found a white palace of stone, so deep that the water became the earth, the earth became the sky, and the sun shone from the heart of the world. An orchard of trees all afire with white blossoms grew all around it, and white waterfalls fell from high cliffs beyond its balconies. On the ship, she had been forty-one years old and tired to the bone, but here beneath the second sky she was nineteen and nothing ached.

A white queen with dark lips and dark eyes came out to meet her, embraced her like a sister and kissed her cheek.

"Alice," she said, delighted, "I was beginning to think you were never coming back."

"I've had many dreams," Alice replied, "but none of the right ones. I am glad to see you, though, Your Majesty."

The White Queen shook her head. "Call me Mirana, Alice. We are of equal rank, now, or have you not heard?"

Alice frowned. She could not recall being promoted beyond ship's captain. "They have called me the pale queen, and the white queen," she said at last, after thinking very hard, "but I am not a queen at all. They only call me that because I am strange and carry a sword and captain a ship."

"If they call you a queen, you are a queen. The balance is corrected. Did you know that my sister, though she called herself the Red Queen, was not? She was a Queen, yes, the Queen of Hearts, but the Red Queen is someone else entirely. You and I are much the same -- they call you the White Queen, but the White Queen is me, and you are someone else. Names are confusing sometimes, but you are a queen as surely as I am, because all names you are given are yours forever."

"Then is your sister still a queen?" Alice asked, remembering her promise at last. It had been six years, and she had forgotten much of the dream on waking, real though it was.

Mirana tilted her head one way and then the other, fluttered her fingers thoughtfully, then nodded. "Indeed she is, though it is hard to call someone a queen when they have no kingdom at all but dust."

"She is very sad, you know," Alice told her seriously. "The Knave of Hearts has died and left her alone. She was weeping in the dirt all by herself. Could you perhaps let her come back, even if it's not all the way? I don't think she will trouble you any more. She is too old and too sad to be as cruel as she was before."

The White Queen hemmed and hawed and paced circles around Alice, her white dress dragging on the white flagstones with a thin rasping sound like pouring sand. "I suppose I could, at that," she said at last, then stopped and put her hands down. It made her look taller and more serious. "I am not a very kind person, you know. My mother made me vow to harm no living thing before she named me her successor, and do you know why? Because I was very unkind indeed, the very unkindest there was. For a very long time I have locked away that part of myself and learned to fear it. Perhaps I have behaved more cruelly to my sister than I ought to have, because it was a chance to be cruel while keeping my promise. Perhaps I am still no kinder than I was then."

She affixed Alice with her dark, dark eyes, and for a moment looked very cold and awful, and all her gleaming palace looked grey around her. For that moment, Alice was almost afraid, even though she knew the Queen could not harm her.

Then the moment passed, the Queen's face softened, and she turned away. "Do you think me a terrible person, Alice?" she asked. "Have I done something unforgivable?"

Alice shook her head and pressed a hand to the Queen's pale, icy cheek. "No, and no. But I do think you should bring your sister back. If you wish, you can blame the kindness on me, and I shall owe you a favour."

"No, you shan't, because I owed you a favour first," Mirana pointed out. "You slew the Jabberwock and returned my kingdom to me. If you say I should be kind to Iracebeth, then I shall, because you say it."

"I say it, then," said Alice, then noticed with a start that her hands were transparent as rosy glass. "Dear me, I think I'm waking up again. Forgive me, Mirana, I can't stay. Perhaps I shall come see you again before the end, but I can't be certain, so goodbye just in case."

The White Queen smiled, and when she spoke it was with certainty, the echoing voice of prophecy and magic. "No. You will come back again, Alice of Overworld. At least once, you will return, and I will be there if you choose to come see me, so I will not say goodbye. I rather think, however, that there is someone else you will go to visit instead. He has been waiting for a very long time, after all."

She took Alice's ghostly face between her hands and kissed her once on each cheek, once on the forehead, and once very softly on the lips. "Farewell, dear Alice," she whispered through the gathering mists. "I will tell my sister who to thank."

Alice awoke three fathoms underwater with a mouthful of sea, and strove upwards for the sun with all her strength.

x.x.x

In the dark of the city, two old men met and drank cup after cup of clear, bitter brew, and talked of tall tales and rumours.

"They say the pale queen is dead," one said; mournfully, because he had loved her from afar for a very long time.

"How did it happen?" asked the other; gently, because he loved his friend.

"They say they carried her off the ship in England, her hair all white from weariness, and took her home to the Ascot house. The next morning, they say, she went for a walk in the woods and the faeries stole her away."

"Bah, the faeries only like little children, and she was an old maid. Hardly seems likely."

"I know that, but she's gone even so. No body, no bones, nothing. Just gone. She was very thin at the end, they say, so perhaps the wind just carried her off into the sky."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"I'll be ridiculous if I want to be, I'm an old man."

"Suit yourself."

"Anyhow, it seems she won't be coming back. Wherever she went, however she got there, I think she'll stay there for good this time. But who knows? Maybe she'll come waltzing out of the woods three days hence, or three weeks, or three years. She's magic, you know. It can't be ruled out."

"I suppose it can't, at that."

x.x.x

At the ripe old age of fifty-seven, the pale golden queen of the high seas left all her considerable wealth and power behind and walked into the woods behind Lord Ascot's manor (the third Lord Ascot, now, the second had taken ill and died at the age of twenty-seven, resentful and indignant to the end) and after a very short search, found a deep hole in the ground between the roots of a dead old oak stump.

She was a ghost of her former self -- what brittle white hair she had left was tied up in a severe knot at the nape of her neck, her skin was parchment-thin and riddled with blue veins, and her bones were rickety as old birch branches.

Her name was Alice Kingsleigh, and she had lived her life until this end, this Tuesday afternoon in early October. She was, at long last, ready for the immortality she had once been offered. Then she had been too young and too alive to waste herself on a world where nothing died. Now she was old and walked hand-in-hand with death, and now, therefore, she was qualified to make the choice she could not have made then.

Taking one last deep breath of sharp autumn air, Alice stepped off the edge, fell through the world, and died.

She woke up on the other side with her face pillowed on her hands (unlined, graceful, young hands), which were resting on a sturdy wooden table. The sun washed over her like clear water, and the wind was merry in her long flaxen hair.

"You're back!" said the Hatter joyfully, for of course it was his table, and it was laden to bursting with teapots and cups and cakes and crumpets, the finest tea party in all the worlds. For many years he had reckoned it a curse, she remembered from the very first time, to live forever at six o'clock and never see sunset or night-time or dawn after, but he was much more mad now and seemed to have come to terms with it. "What did I tell you, hare? I told you she'd come back, I did, and here she is."

"Here I am," she agreed, sitting up straight and taking stock of herself. "I must say, this is the loveliest tea party I've ever been to. I apologize for all the terrible things I said about it the first time, and take them all back. It's perfectly delightful." Just in time, she tilted her head to avoid the teacup hurtling through the air mere inches from her cheek. "Hello, March Hare, I am very glad to see you as well."

The Hare giggled and grinned wildly and threw another, this one off into the woods southaways.

"Are you--" the Hatter began, then paused to swallow nervously, green eyes flicking this way and that, looking anywhere but at Alice. "Are you staying, this time, perhaps? At least for a little while?"

"I am," she replied with a radiant smile, "and what's more, I plan to stay for tea."

"But it's always tea," the Hatter said, befuddled.

"Quite," Alice replied, and took a sip from her delicate china cup. She had tasted many teas on her travels, many of the very finest in the world, but in the moment, she thought that none could possibly equal the tea the Hatter had made under his eternal early-evening sun from the leaves which grew in Underland.

The Hatter being the Hatter, all his feelings moved about just under his skin, as easy to see and understand as the veins and muscles of his pale, spidery hands. "Oh," he said, then, "Oh! I see! Will you really? Really truly honestly?" His delight shone out from his face, unguarded and fire-bright.

Alice laughed. "I said I would, didn't I? Do I look like a girl who says she'll do one thing and does another instead?"

Drawing himself up to his feet, and sweeping a low brow, nearly toppling his hat onto the table amid the pastries, the Hatter said "Indeed you do not, Alice Kingsleigh. I shall be honoured to serve you tea for as long as you please. Help yourself to the scones, there's plenty of jam and they're very fresh."

"Don't mind if I do," she said, and did exactly that.

x.x.x

Forever was a very long time, even in a land which counted its time in them, but Alice was a very patient, very curious girl, and Underland was very big and very, very wonderful. There were a thousand upon a thousand adventures more adventures yet for her to have.

Her name was Alice Kingsleigh, _the_ Alice, and she was home at last.

**X.x.x.x.X**

**A/N:** When I started writing this, it was supposed to be Alice/Hatter. Not sure what happened to that idea.


End file.
